Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance (72 page)

I wondered how deep the snow was in Montana right now. Suddenly, desperately, I wanted to find out – I wanted to go there, I wanted to drag Devon with me, and I wanted to never, ever, come back.

“And what is Ashley thinking just now?”

I came back to where I was with a start, and looked up to see Devon looking back at me, curious and intent, his arms still folded as he still leaned over the abyss.

I shrugged. “I was thinking that Montana looks pretty good to me right now, bears and all.”

“To me as well, sweet Ashley.”

“So can we go there? Now? You can tell me your story there, right?”

“Nice try, but no. I do not deserve Montana. I do not deserve you. But you deserve to hear the truth that led me to this day and this roof.”

I nodded. I waited. I didn’t argue with him about what we did or didn’t deserve, I just listened. The rock-steady calm I’d felt a few minutes before fell over me again, and again I felt I was just missing something about how I could be so calm.

Why did I think it maybe had something to do with Montana, with something I’d said or done there?

Devon broke into my muddled thoughts with that precise, professional lecturer’s voice.

“As previously stated, my uncle beat me into a coma that lasted three days – when I awoke, I lay in a strange bed in an unknown hospital, and I was quite alone.

“A child in my condition most certainly belonged in a pediatric intensive care unit, but the Killanes used their influence and obscene amounts of money to see that I was placed in a private room, where there were fewer eyes to see and fewer tongues to pass on word of a barely alive boy with terribly suspicious injuries.

“During those three days that I drifted between death and life, I am told that doctors came and went at all hours, bustling in by twos and threes, conferring and commenting and issuing orders. Nurses lived by my side, administering medications and monitoring the machines that reported every breath I took and every faint beat of my heart.

“Doctors and nurses alike filed reports with the authorities despite the Killanes’ best efforts, but unconscious live boys are unable to testify as to being beaten three-quarters dead, and so everyone waited for me to be awake and fit to speak.

“My uncles and aunts and the family lawyers dreaded that moment. The hospital staff watched for that moment, the police and prosecutors prepared for it, and yet when it came, I was alone.

“One nurse had stepped out, and the next had not yet entered. The doctors were elsewhere. The technicians who drew blood and the housekeeping staff who cleaned were busy in other rooms, with other patients. I opened my eyes, and only the machines saw.

“Lights glared down at me from the ceiling like angry suns. White-hot pain blazed inside my head, and each reflection shining from the many metal and plastic surfaces in the room was like a separate knife stabbing into my eyes. I cried out, and only the machines answered, with beeps and buzzes and a constant humming.

“They answered and they spoke to me, low and insistent. I did not understand, not yet, but being machines, they were patient and they could wait.”

“Devon?”

He glanced over at me, looking up from the view below his feet for just a moment. “Yes, Ashley?”

“Devon, please tell me this story doesn’t involve you having hallucinatory conversations with talking machines.”

There went both eyebrows again. “Certainly not – my brain was wounded, not broken beyond repair. I may be quite nutteringly insane today, but on that day, I was still merely … lost, rudderless, without focus and alone.

“The low background chorus of all those monitors gave me a focus over those next few hours, helping me hang on to thoughts that threatened to run away. I came to greater wakefulness in those hours, my mind closed in on the single greatest truth of my life, and when it came … the murmurs and hums and leaping pings and beeps of those machines anchored me in that one perfect second, and I have lived in that second ever since.”

Okay …

“So your story is leading up to this ‘single greatest truth’ thing, right? And it will make sense, and won’t require me to believe in heart monitors that whisper the secrets of the universe?”

“Just so.”

“Oh, and big guy?”

“Yes, my Ashley?”

“You’re not insane. You’re hurting and scared and moody and impossible and heartbreaking, but you’re not one bit insane, not really.”

He shrugged and turned back to the abyss, staring down at it like a prizefighter trying to intimidate an opponent. “On the matter of my absent sanity, I suppose we must agree to disagree.”

“Oh, and in addition to that other stuff, put yourself down for also being sweet, loving, adorable, and sexy as all hell.”

A tiny smile flashed across his face. “You are too kind.”

“Devon?”

“Yes?”

“Devon, I’m not too kind – I love you. You understand that, don’t you?”

He shook his head, pulled his shoulders together, and closed his eyes, just for a second. Then he opened them again and sighed.

“I understand, but you shouldn’t love me. You really, really should not. I am bad for you, my Ashley, bad beyond words. I’m bad for everyone.”

Easy, Ashley. Baby steps. Don’t push him.

“And we’ll have to agree to disagree on that as well, big guy – in the meantime, tell me what happened once you were all the way awake. I’m assuming, I don’t know, nurses rushed to your side, doctors got all learned and talkative, and the Killanes panicked?”

He nodded. “All of those things happened, and more. A fog hides my memories of that first hour or so of wakefulness, but on occasion, it shifts to reveal moments of startling clarity – a nurse adjusting an IV, the keening howl I made when a doctor shone a light into my eyes … there was a man I almost recognized, a man in a decent sort of suit who might have been a Killane lawyer – the nurses chased him out in short order, I recall that … other men ducked in, in worse suits, and I rather think they were police detectives or authorities of some other stripe, though at the time I knew them only as grey blurs who were also sent away from my side.

“Time passed and I came back to myself, though it happened ever so slowly. Someone stood by the foot of my bed discussing my chart with another someone, a lab technician came to draw blood, I spoke a few words in a tiny, halting voice when a nurse asked me how I felt, and my surroundings firmed up. People became distinct individuals and not shadows, I started following the conversations I heard around me, and my memories then become rather more complete and clear.

“But as the hours flowed past and the world steadied around me, I found my thoughts drawn elsewhere. I did not think so much about the hospital, about what had happened to put me there, or what might happen next. I did not think about the people circulating in and out of my room, or the angry voices I heard arguing in the hall. A television flickered, high on a wall in a distant corner, but I ignored it.

“Instead, I fought to understand … everything. Specifics were beyond me, my immediate surroundings were meaningless, but something drove me to think of the entire web of my life, of all the suffering and loss, the pain that had lanced through every moment since that one fateful day when I was torn from Mama’s arms.

“Why? Why did all that happen? What possible reason or purpose could lie behind that endless river of abuse and rage and fear? Why did everyone leave me? Whose fault was all of this? What could it mean, and would it ever, ever end?”

“That’s a hell of a lot for one scared, hurting ten-year-old boy to try and figure out, Devon.”

I watched the icy cloud of my breath drift away. “And why would you try to take on that much, anyway? Why didn’t you just hang in there and rest, and maybe worry about what would happen when a certain attempted-murderer uncle showed up?”

He shook his head with a strange intensity, denying my questions before I’d even finished asking them. “No, Ashley, no. You misunderstand me – though it is of course my fault for not making myself quite clear.”

He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and back again, and he spoke to the void below.

“I did not choose to lay out all the facts and examine them like a puzzle. I did not decide to determine just what was going on in my miserable wreck of a life, with a view to coming up with a plan of action. I certainly did not think about Uncle Kennan at all.

“Those facts and those faces and those thousand awful moments pulled at me, Ashley, pulled at me and forced me down one particular path that led to a specific destination.

“I knew with the certainty of breathing that I was not meant to unravel the matter, to divine the meaning of all that had happened to me, like a scientist examining a strand of DNA – I knew I had to allow myself to be drawn down that path, and that at its end I would be shown the truth.

“That truth was not a pearl to be dug free from an oyster’s shell, not a thing to be divined or reasoned out or found by any amount of searching.”

He looked up from the depths and turned to stare at me, his arms still crossed against his chest.

“That truth was a magnet, Ashley, and I was helpless in its grip. It drew me in, pulled me closer minute by minute, until I arrived at the end of the path and understood. In that one shattering instant, I understood everything.”

He looked away, addressing the clouds and the snow. “That revelation determined the rest of my life. The special project was not born immediately – it came later, much later – but it sprang from that moment as surely as an arrow leaps from a bow.”

He said nothing after that, falling silent for an endless thirty seconds or so.

I stepped into the silence.

“Devon?”

“Yes, my Ashley?”

“Devon, I guess this revelation we’re coming up on was the kind of thing you can only understand from the inside, but still … whatever the hell it was, can you see that from my perspective, it doesn’t make any kind of sense that you’re standing on that ledge because of some mystical moment you experienced almost thirty years ago, while you were a child recovering from a serious head injury?”

And again, a nod. “I see your point of view with crystal clarity – and as always, you are calm and clever, and also quite right.”

“Pardon me, but I’m watching the man I love standing atop one seriously tall building, getting ready to do away with himself – so no, I’m not one bit of calm.”

But somehow, I was. I was way more calm than I had any right to be, under the circumstances.

Why?

I had the feeling that I knew, that I was being pulled toward my own revelation – and that I could see it right now, if I only looked hard enough.

Then that voice I loved and trusted, that voice that drove me crazy and pulled me in six different directions at once, broke into my thoughts.

“You are sweet and loving and frightened, my Ashley, and I apologize with all my heart for frightening you. And you are also right about my state of mind that day, but so am I. The only explanation I can offer is that nothing made sense before that one perfect moment, and afterwards, everything did.”

“And so this earth-shaking revelation arrived maybe three or four hours after you woke up, shortly before your snake of an aunt crawled through the door?”

“Just so. I’m estimating the time – I dozed off here and there, and of course I was subject to the influence of quite a few medications, so reality still wavered just a bit around the edges – but I would say four hours sounds close to the mark.”

“So what was this shattering personal revelation like? Did it, I don’t know, come with flashing neon lights and a band? Were there clowns, elephants, maybe a ringmaster with a bullhorn?”

Devon laughed, and that laugh was the best music I’d ever heard.

It sounded like hope.

“I fear no circus animals or ghoulish clowns were involved, more’s the pity. It was … it was both humbler than that, and far more grand.”

He waited, a few seconds bled away, and then he described the indescribable.

“I remember a nurse was at my bedside when it happened, an older woman with an iron rod for a spine and waves of fierce grey hair. She clucked disapproval at one of the pinging machines, tinkered with a dial and adjusted a knob, and then glanced down at me with a look that said I was somehow conspiring with the machine’s readouts to displease her.

“I looked past her at the wall and thought about Mama. I thought about that beautiful, doomed horse. I thought about the ants.

“Then a single beep echoed from another machine, she turned to stare that one down, and it happened.

He sucked in a single deep breath, held it as he closed his eyes, and then sighed it out again. His eyes opened.

“It struck me down in an instant. I was pinned beneath its weight, though it was not a thing that existed in the physical world. It set me on fire and wiped everything else from my mind. All my past and future fell on me at once, and yet I also stood alone at the center of a vast stage, it was … I was … I cannot hope to explain what I saw and became in that instant, truly.

“I was like Paul on the road to Damascus, or a Buddhist monk transmuting his soul into the stuff of nirvana … I was forever changed by the truth that had been there all along, if only I’d had eyes to see.

“You see, Ashley, I came to the end of the path in that moment. I came to the end of the path, I looked upon the truth that waited there, and I saw my own face.

“I was the reason for everything.”

His haunted eyes begged me to understand.

“I stood at the center of it all. Before, my life and the lives surrounding me were unconnected bits of flotsam riding the flood – after, all that pain and suffering and loss and madness made sense, because I was at the heart of it. I was the connection, the one common thread that linked everything.”

Those eyes bore into me. His need for me to understand was like a vast weight balancing atop a mountain, ready to come crashing down at the touch of the slightest breeze.

“A beaten, abused, unwanted boy, the son of a suicide mother and a drunken, dead father – it all seemed so much to ask of random chance, but in that moment I saw that randomness and chance and the cruel hand of chaos had nothing to do with it.